It is not new for a smartphone manufacturer to create a sub-brand of their phone. Huawei did this with Honor and Micromax did it with the Yu. The sub-branding exercise is usually carried out to create a brand that exclusively caters to the online buyers. This time around Oppo has come up with a new sub-brand called Realme. The Realme 1 will be sold exclusively on Amazon in India and is likely to be priced between the Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 price bracket.
The Amazon Page for Realme 1 has already gone live and it is here that we can find more about the phone. Oppo has put up the image of the Realme alongside a rather drab run of the mill smartphone. The image is accompanied by the tagline “Wait for Realme’s unique Diamond Black.”
That being said, the Realme 1 will come with a single lens camera unit at the back. The design seems to be the forte of the device, the Diamond Black color scheme does look appealing. Oppo claims to have tested the Realme 1 for what it calls “Real Quality” and this test includes 10,000 drop tests, 100,000 button test, 10,000 USB tests and other. As far as after sales are concerned, the RealMe 1 will be backed by more than 500 authorized service centers alongside a guaranteed one hour resolution time.
Is “Xiaomi” the real reason for “RealMe”?
Brands like Oppo and Vivo apparently have an excellent offline retail network. The companies have sales points across every nook and corner of the country and also cover the rural areas as well. Thanks to the sales channel along with strong after-sales support, Oppo and Vivo have been doing decently well. However, as brands, Oppo and Vivo don’t ring a bell when it comes to online consumers. In this segment, Xiaomi, Lenovo-Motorola and Honor take the lead. Perhaps it is for this very reason that Oppo wants to create an online exclusive sub-brand and go loggerheads with likes of Xiaomi and Honor. But how does this affect its equations with the retailers and offline distributors remains to be seen.